High end villa in Bangalore

I am just sending a front page ad in the TOI for a villa in Whitefield, from Total Environment, for 13 plus crores. 

How to add price without really adding value.

Bangalore builders Total Environment are masters at that.

Modus Operandi: 

Or: how to extract money from the Bangalore software crowd. 

Buy piece of land on outskirts. Build a good quality house. So far so good. 

But how do you extract three times the price from the techie? The typical  Bangalore software senior executive, is, as we know, earning a lot of money and waiting to hand it over if you use the right approach.

So,

Create a "natural" / "earthy" / "environmentally conscious" image around the brand.

Grow grass on the roof, keep exposed brick, make it rustic. 

From the picture I suspect these are row houses sharing common walls , which is distinctly not upmarket. I may be mistaken but it looks like that. So, you call it "V 40" ( for a moment I thought it was a BMW engine), " earth sheltered" ( what does that mean??), " courtyard homes" ( make up your mind, is it a home or a courtyard?), and , "exclusive access to your rear garden ( oh thank God. I always like access to my rear to be exclusive!) 

Next step is to choose a name. 

Total Environment excels in this department. Their names are like: 

Opera of a Symphonic Synchrony 

Vistas of a Jungle Epiphany 

Ninth Orgasm in Seventh Heaven,

And so on 

Next, how to extract more money: let's have grades, like silver, gold..  how about green grade and then upgrade to purple, which is the colour of royalty. 

It's very funny, but the more exclusive and rich people become, the more gradations they want to prove that they are more exclusive and rich than their neighbour. Your typical middle class fellow buying a flat at Puttanna Afrahara will never be impressed by such distinctions. "Adhella bitbidi, rate heli ashte", he will say. 

But, please to remember, the target market is the Bangalore MNC executive. So, green and purple it is.

And then, it strikes them. These people have so much money, they don't know what to do with it. So, what to do? How to take it from them? Offer early payment plan. Pay 12 crores ( small change for the Bangalore IT MNC executive, as we all know) up front and get ten percent discount. 

It is another funny human trait that, we chase after products that are priced three times ( 300 percent) of what they should be, and then get suckered to get a ten percent discount. 

And then you throw in a "dedicated design manager" , and "personalised architect", really valuable to the techie, who knows only software. For everything else in life, including stepping out into the street, he needs a dedicated manager.  Contrast that with our fellow in Puttanna Afrahara who,  when he builds a house, his contractor does everything for him. 

And thus the price for a row house near a remote Lake in a Whitefield suburb reaches 13  crores * .  The * of course means there are several extras over and above that. To put that in perspective, for Bombay people, this is like selling a flat in Dombivili at Upper Worli rates. 

It does not matter to the IT Executive since he will plonk down the money by selling one percent of his stock options.

So the techie executive does that. He is happy. His family is happy, Total Environment is happy. Bangalore has a way of making everyone happy.